Skin Shader

Starting from the Skin Color Texture I painted the necessary textures for the skin shader in Photoshop. As I was rendering with VRay, I had to have the color map, a reflection map, a sub surface scattering map (sss) and an additional bump map, to help the normal map generated with ZBrush (Fig.11).

Fig. 11

You can see the skin shader settings in Fig.12.

Fig. 12

Rendering & Lighting

For rendering I used VRay, and turned on Global Illumination. I also added an HDR image on the Environment map. You can see the setting of both in Fig.13.

Fig. 13

For the lighting I did some render test. Some were just for the skin and some with the cloth beneath the astronaut costume, so I could see how each shader was affected.

The final light rig came out like this: I used three VRay planar lights as soft lights (or diffuse lights), then I added three targeted spot lights as key lights for better contrast and definition. I found that the eyes weren't getting enough light so I had to add a little spot light, which excluded the other objects in the scene, and just lit the eyes. It turned out to be a pretty complex light rig with lots of tweaks along the way, but it was effective for this scene. I'd probably do it much more simply today, but it was pretty ok for this scene (Fig.14).

Fig. 14

Compositing

I rendered just one color/light pass for this image and one occlusion pass. I also rendered the hair from the eyebrows on another pass, just to be sure that the renders wouldn't crash.

I composited everything in Photoshop and just added a few color correction layers before the final image was done (Fig.15).

Fig. 15

And here is the final image (Fig.16)!

Fig. 16

Conclusion

Firstly I must thank 3DTotal for the great textures CDs they've made, which helped me a lot in the process of creating this image. I hope you found this Making Of helpful and enjoyed reading it!